If you ask me, I'll tell you that "The Ocean at the End of the Lane" is Neil Gaiman's portrait of the artist as a young man. With this book, Gaiman has crafted an achingly beautiful memoir of an imagination and a spellbinding story that sets three women at the center of everything.

If you ask me, I'll tell you that this is not only a creation myth (of imagination, of a meaningful life, of the universe), but also a wonderful fairy tale with some truly creepy moments. Set in the English countryside of Gaiman's childhood, the story's middle-aged narrator (an artist) flees a family funeral, retreating "toward a house that had not existed for decades." He ends up at the pond at the end of the lane where he first met the Hempstock women (Old Mrs. Hempstock, Ginnie and Lettie), a trinity of females who recall when "the moon was made," who can "snip fragments of time," and who are "not in the fabric of the universe," but "outside of it." | June 14, 2013»Read Full Article

In Woody Allen's movie "Love and Death," Boris (Allen) asks that quintessential Allen question: "What if there is no God?" Ten years later, in "The Purple Rose of Cairo," Mia Farrow's Cecilia answers, in words that would give any actor pause: A world without God, she tells Tom (Jeff Daniels), "would be like a movie with no point, and no happy ending."

Hence, it's no surprise that the dilemma opening "God" — a one-act Allen play written in the same year as "Love and Death" that's now being staged by Soulstice Theatre — involves a playwright named Hepatitis (Tim Kietzman) and an actor named Diabetes (Joe Dolan), struggling to come up with an ending for a play. | Jan. 25, 2014»Read Full Article